If you are interested in engaging your customers with personalized 1:1 experiences on different devices, at different times of the day, and in near real-time, Responsys may be for you. Responsys compiles all of your marketing orchestration needs into one platform. It empowers the customer to determine their own next experience by interacting with them at their request.

This article will introduce you to the different elements of Responsys and how easily they can be used to elevate customer experience.

Email Marketing

Responsys can send millions of e-mail messages in a matter of minutes. It’s very impressive! But not only can the platform send to different email carriers in minutes, you can set up A/B Testing for messaging, add dynamic content into your e-mails to personalize your message, and even send personalized image content to your customer. How it works? It’s pretty simple.

If you are in e-commerce and working on an e-mail campaign where your customers have searched for a particular product, you can add an image of that product (and other products) to your email to create a more personalized experience that is relevant to your customer’s journey.

Push Marketing

Push marketing is also simple in Responsys. With your SDK installed, a marketer can customize messages to users in your mobile application through push messaging. If you are looking to retain customers on your mobile app, you may want to send a coupon and push messaging will drive viewers back to the app. If you are looking to inform a customer of a new product, this is a great way to send the most up-to-date information right to their fingertips.

SMS Marketing

This has become a huge opportunity for digital marketers. SMS marketing campaigns offer a fantastic way of engaging with your customers to keep your brand relevant. It’s also a great way to keep customers happier and more informed, with a good example being shipping confirmations. Directly from Responsys, you can schedule custom SMS messages to those subscribed to text messaging so you can instantly send them general coupons, specific SMS promotions, etc.

Data Integration

Responsys has a concrete foundation focused on data. Data is critical for the success of a customer’s journey. When you think about how you will first engage and then retain your customers, having all of the data is crucial to making that happen. Responsys has the necessary integrations available for things like CRM systems, finance systems, additional customer databases and service portals, as well as the ability to upload contacts to multiple tables to help you personalize your customer messaging.

Cross-Channel Orchestration

Finally, Responsys is built with a cross-channel orchestration mind. In general. people receive messages in multiple ways and everyone has a different medium they prefer. Responsys has the ability for a marketer to build 1:1 experience across multiple channels. Build your dynamic content e-mail to thank someone for purchasing something on your site, then send them shipping confirmations via SMS message. Once they receive their product, send them an e-mail asking for feedback for your manufacturing team. All of these touchpoints can occur within one active campaign and is all set up on the Responsys frontend!

What Responsys isn’t?

Responsys is not a platform for one-to-one relationship information. We like to describe it this way: if you are a B2C company sending millions of messages to individuals, Responsys can perform for you; however, if you are a B2B content marketing agency, Eloqua is going to provide you the more detailed information on the contact from a reporting standpoint.

Interested in learning more? Click here to get more information and/or ask us anything you would like to know about Responsys and how it might fit into your marketing strategy.

Everywhere you look (probably on your desk right now), there are mobile phones. SMS marketing campaigns offer a fantastic way of engaging with your customers to keep your brand relevant. It’s also a great way to keep customers happier and more informed, like if a customer was receiving shipping confirmations. SMS messaging provides a 98 percent open rate (compared to a 20 percent open rate with email messages). And 90 percent of SMS are also read within three minutes of delivery!

If you planning on incorporating SMS messaging into your marketing strategy, here are some tips to get started.

Think about how you’ll gather contacts

With SMS, you need to find a customer’s phone number by, in most cases, asking. There are many ways to ask for a phone number like on a pop-up banner on your website or by asking a customer in your store. Just as you receive text alerts when checking into a hotel, reservation or flight, a great way to let customers know about your SMS programs is to tell them what they will receive upon subscription. Make sure to look at all avenues of a new or potential customer and determine if you have the ability to ask for a phone number.

Note: If you are using Responsys and need some clarification on how you can opt customers in, shoot us a note here and we can help.

Remember the legal stuff

From a legal perspective, it is very important to get permission (even after they have submitted for information!) from your customers. You should always consider them potential subscribers until they have opted in to your shortcode.

Example: Press 1 to opt-in.

Alternatively you can include an option to opt-out prior to the launch of your SMS marketing campaign. This option should be clearly visible throughout the course of your campaign.

Example: Text ‘STOP’ to cancel.

Don’t forget about time zones!

I’m sure you have had someone who has sent you a SMS message at 5AM before, right? Make sure to keep your segments updated and ensure you’ve added time zone as a segment filter on your campaign. (Assuming you are using Responsys, you can do this simply by scheduling the messages within the campaign) It is never good to be the “neighbor who wakes you up.” Be cognizant and pay attention to time zones to send the right SMS message at the right time.

Think about the relationship- keep engaging with those who like to be engaged

Cross channel marketing and marketing automation help marketers maintain relationships with their customers. If you have a customer who continually opens and clicks on your SMS message, you are probably doing something right. Be sure to look at your SMS message to see if other campaigns can connect to keep your relationship stronger. If your customers are not opening your SMS messages, maybe it’s time to send them a coupon to see if this will re-engage them. Think about the relevancy you’d like to maintain on a 1:1 basis and then map all of your active campaigns to ensure your customer is receiving the correct frequency.

SMS messaging is a very effective marketing method as mobile is becoming THE way to engage customers in both marketing and service to provide the best customer experience. As you plan your campaign, use these tips to ensure its success when including SMS. If you are using Responsys, all of these features are available for you to manage at your fingertips! If you need more information about how to enable SMS messaging in Responsys, please let us know!

https://i2.wp.com/sfcg.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Cell-Phone-Closeup.jpg?fit=960%2C640640960Jamie Smithhttp://sfcg.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/logo.pngJamie Smith2017-08-09 13:52:002017-08-09 21:18:13How to Get Started With SMS Marketing

In today’s world, customers have become more and more powerful during the buying process. It is critical for marketing and sales teams to work together to appeal to people early in the buying cycle and deliver a great customer experience for their customers when they are ready to purchase. Eloqua provides us a simple and easy qualification process to approach the right customer at the right time by automatically qualifying leads based on their demographic and behavioral characteristics that matter to your business. That is lead scoring. This article will walk you through how to begin thinking about what is important in your customer qualification, and give you the tools to know when to reach out based on the lead scoring system you create.

So, how does lead scoring work in Eloqua?

There are two dimensions about lead scoring: profile and engagement.

The profile score depends on the explicit data of an account such as job role, industry, revenue and so on. The profile score will help you better identify prospects that are in your target audience. Eloqua’s system will give your prospects a score of A, B, C or D. To simplify, the score will tell you if the prospect is the right fit or not, with A being the best fit.

The engagement score depends on the implicit data such as the people that have visited your website or opened your newsletters/emails, which determines their level of interest. Prospects are given a score that ranges from 1-4 with 1 being the highest.

Eloqua will combine these two scores together and produce a final lead score. For example: A4 or D1. Now let’s take a closer look of these scores: A4 is the right prospect to reach out to, however, the interest level is lowest. To further nurture this potential opportunity, we may need to send out more information to evoke interest. On the other hand, when you see a contact’s score is D1, the person has a high interest level, however, the person is not in your target audience. Doing some further investigation might be warranted to verify your data is correct on their profile, but make sure to prioritize the people you have selected as better fits for your company.

Where do you start?

Start with a conversation between sales and marketing.

Lead scoring is not a solo play. Marketing efforts will attract the potential audience and the goal is to increase their interest over time, but eventually your sales team will need to contact these people depending on how customers act against the marketing activities you have in place. The two teams need to discuss a comprehensive standard when deciding what factors should be considered in each team’s engagement based off of the customer experience.

Set up the lead scoring model in Eloqua

Go to Eloqua, click audience and choose Lead Scoring. From the two options, select ‘Create a Model’. Change the name on the top left.

On the top of the editing page, you can see there are two tabs called “Profile” and “Engagement”. On the left of this page, there is a panel contains all kinds of criteria.

Let’s begin with the profile portion. You can choose the criteria from different sections by clicking the drop box on the top left.

Drag or double click the criteria you need. In the example below, I chose job roles, industry and annual revenue. As a best practice, we recommend 3 to 5 criteria.

Weight the criteria based on their importance. The more important the criteria is, the higher the percentage it should be. The remaining percentage will be shown at the right bottom.

Add value to the criteria. The closer the value is to the ideal lead the more points the value should be assigned. Double click the criteria to add roles. In this example, the higher the person’s job role is within their company, the better. Based on that, we assign different percentages to these job roles. Keep adding other roles for industry and annual revenue.

Configuring the engagement portion is pretty similar. Simply select the criteria on the left. When choosing these criteria, in order to better determine the interest/engagement level, you should think about frequency and recency at the same time. You should choose activities that are good indicators someone might buy. Just as an example, I chose opened email, visited landing page and submitted form. Follow the same steps as you did in the profile portion to give these criteria weights and rules.

You need to set up all the rules for each criteria in this lead scoring model.

Change the threshold for each score to decide the standards for each score to reach. Click the “>>” on the top right, then click “settings”, and adjust the threshold based on your needs.

Now, you are ready to activate your lead scoring model! Click the “>>” on the top right, and activate.

Setting the original lead scoring model is definitely not the end of the lead qualification process. Don’t forget to keep revising the criteria when you have a deeper understanding of your sales or have more data collected from your marketing. Lead scoring should be a living model and grow together with your business.